The selection committee noted that Eun-Jeung Lee's habilitation thesis, which was published in 2003, has become a standard work in Korean studies and can be regarded as a reference work in the consideration of universal historical approaches. In addition, it has opened up new perspectives for the political history of ideas by using "the foreign" as an analytical category in which Western political thought is compelled to acknowledge the limits of validity. As a "border crosser" between the East Asian and German-European cultural circles, Eun-Jeung Lee has written numerous contributions about current trends in East Asia, such as the transformation of the Asian image, economic ethics, the understanding of the state, and academic culture.

Prof. Dr. Eun-Jeung Lee, who was born in Korea in 1963, majored in political science, sociology, and anthropology at Ewha Womans University in Seoul and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. She earned her doctorate in 1993 with a thesis on national political philosophy and completed the habilitation process in political science in 2001. She taught at the universities of Leipzig, Bochum, Tokyo, and Halle as well as at Ewha Womans University in Seoul. She has been a professor of Korean studies at Freie Universität Berlin since 2008.